Reporting Ethnicity & Religion Study

The Media Diversity Institute Global (MDI Global) is excited to announce FACE, a new project which aims to counter cyberbullying amongst young people.

The project, whose acronym stands for Fighting Against Cyberbullying & Exclusion will develop guidelines, materials, networks and multidisciplinary artistic approaches equip parents, youth workers and students to address the issue in their communities.

We developed FACE in response to the rise of cyberbullying and its extreme negative impacts. Earlier this year, the UK’s communications regulator OFCOM found that one in four children experienced a form of online abuse in 2018. Furthermore, they found that 80% of children surveyed said they were involved in a “potentially harmful online experience.”

We are excited to share that our “Diversity: A Matter of Perception” project in Macedonia has begun implementing 16 new projects, funded by sub grants from the European Commission.

“By targeting one of the most vulnerable groups in the society, people with disabilities, the project builds relations between journalists and media through most of the implemented activities,” the Macedonian Institute for Media wrote in a statement.

“By joining the journalists and representatives from people with disabilities, CSOs to work together, to hear each other and discuss common issues, the project enabled the problems, the interests and the challenges of the people with disabilities come in the journalists’ focus."

One of the projects is a children’s book, where some of the characters are children with disabilities. Another is a creative campaign which trains hiking guides in how to make their hikes accessible to blind people.

Some of the projects relied on arts to challenge common perceptions of disability, including graffiti art, music and theatre. The performance of Cinderella which builds the story on relation between people with and without disability, has been prepared and performed already, including in front of the British prince Edward, but more performances are to come to make this unique inclusive play accessible to more people across Macedonia.

“We want to support media campaigns that increase the visibility of people with disabilities, and change societal perceptions,” said Ivana Jelaca, MDI Western Balkans coordinator.

“Language matters,” she continues. “We encourage journalists to say that someone has a disability, rather than ‘suffers’ a disability—we want to show that disability can be a normal identity, that doesn’t have to prevent anyone from living a normal life.”

Over the past year and a half, “Disability: A Matter of Perception”—co-ordinated by MDI alongside the Macedonian Institute for Media and the National Council of People with Disability Organizations of Macedonia has flipped the concept of disability on its head by running media trainings that challenge journalists in how they cover disabled communities.

Each of the trainings has brought journalists, CSOs and disability activists together to come up with creative story ideas and campaigns that challenge perceptions of disability.

“Before, many journalists only reported on sensationalist stories about disability, after these trainings, they’re focusing on a more positive approach,” said Vlado Krstovski, who runs the National Council of People with Disability Organizations of Macedonia.

We are excited to share that our #SilenceHate participants are starting to publish their articles after several months of hard work.

Our #SilenceHate project kicked off more than one year ago in London, with a five day “Media Camp,” training thirteen participants in the intricacies of how hate speech is used to target migrants, and what journalists can do to counter it.

“Hate speech against migrants is really connected to the rise of the far right narrative,” said Dasha Illic, the project coordinator. Illic ran the training in her capacity at Media Diversity Institute (MDI), while the project was lead by COSPE and run alongside European Federation for Journalists (EFJ), Amnesty Poland, Amnesty Italy, Karpos, Affiria, and the Cyprus Community Media Centre.

From a small social-media campaign to a co-drafter of a UN agreement, Stop Funding Hate has had a huge impact on media racism since 2016. Their grassroots strategy empowers ordinary consumers worldwide to push brands they love to stop funding problematic media coverage in notorious tabloids such as The Daily Mail and The Sun. We recently spoke to Richard Wilson, the Director and co-founder of Stop Funding Hate, to find out more.

MDI: Could you start by telling our readers why you started Stop Funding Hate back in 2016?

There was a huge surge of anti-migrant stories in the UK press, in particular in The Daily Mail, The Sun and The Daily Express. It was clear that this was creating a very toxic atmosphere that was only getting worse. Still, these newspapers just kept on pushing this really negative narrative.

I was very shocked at the way this was starting to spill into violence on the streets. I was thinking to myself, what would it take to persuade these editors to change the way they frame these issues? I was not thinking that we as a society cannot discuss migration. But, it was about the tone of these discussions. For example, The Daily Express in 2016 had 70 front page stories about migrants. Every single one was negative. That looks like a hate campaign.

In Macedonia, only five percent of media literacy teaching processes encourage criticism of the media—a serious problem in a country known for its notorious role in the “fake news” industry leading up to the 2016 elections in the United States.

For this reason, Media Diversity Institute (MDI) partnered with the School of Journalism and Public Relations and national newspaper Nova Makedonija to respond to this research, and create “Media Literacy in the Age of News Overabundance,” a three-year program designed to encourage media literacy among high school students through a student-run monthly newspaper publication called “Medium” and a series of media labs, where students met once a month to explore questions ranging from, “How do we know when journalists are trying to manipulate us?” to “what can we do if someone illegally publishes our photo or video without our permission?”

Breaking into journalism can be a real struggle for many in the UK. If you are a refugee, regardless of your talent and experience, this could be almost impossible.

With this in mind, Vivienne Francis, Journalism Course Leader at London College of Communication, started the Refugee Journalism Project, an initiative that supports refugee and exiled journalists to re-establish their careers in the UK. At the newsrewired event of Journalism.co.uk on 19 July 2017, Vivienne Francis shared the difficulties many individuals are facing how the project has offered a constructive response to the refugee crisis.